How Important Are a Leader's Connections to the Success of a Talent Agency?

East West Players’ research addresses the value of ‘who you know’…

It’s a relationship business. (duh)

Coordinator/Consultant Ming Lo has now interviewed with a range of stakeholders: theatre managers, actors, agents, TV network executives, marketing firm CEO’s, lawyers. Reaction to the idea of an Asian Pacific American talent agency has been as varied as the interviewees, ranging from enthusiasm to curiosity to (very frank) disinterest. But, one glaring trend from nearly every interview was the acknowledgement that the success of the agency would hinge on the person recruited to take the lead as an agent. Or rather, it would hinge on the connections he/she has.

Case in point: One agent from a mid-sized respectably established agency (who asked to remain anonymous) described some of the fellow agents in the firm. “One agent has 10 connections. Another has 5. This other one has 5.” The implication: These agents are defined (if even only in part) by their connections- specifically to casting directors- enough for them to be numerically listed and categorized. These connections, as Arts Education Director Marilyn Tokuda, has noted, become the ‘lifeblood’ for the agency.

The logic is this: A casting director (often under pressure from the director and/or producers) will often turn to trusted agents who can send 5-10 strong actors with one phone call. Often under deadline tight deadline, he/she won’t bother making cold calls or contacting agents with ‘poor’ reputations. This streamlines the audition process; saves on scheduling and, ultimately, production costs. It’s a matter of efficiency. This is no big surprise in an industry defined by the bottom line. But this is confirmation that in the creation of an APA talent agency, we we’ll have to wrap this dose of ‘reality’ with our goals of creating a mission-driven prototype. To win the game, we may have to play by these rules—or at least bring on someone who does. We know: To support careers of APA actors, we must form a venture that is effective (at the least) and also financially viable (ideally!). Possible Future Blog Title: Hippie-spirited community activism dons HBO Entourage-style suit (and attitude) to meet our mission.

Individual interviews (by phone and in person) are ongoing. Arts Education Director Marilyn Tokuda and Coordinator/Consultant Ming Lo have begun to cull and analyze the data. (Did you know – according to one source – that the average base salary for a Hollywood agent ranges from $85-$120K? Not a lot of these kinds of salaries in nonprofit theatre!)

The next step: Draft 1 of a Business Plan. Stay tuned.



--Lisa Tang, East West Players

How Valuable are Theatre Partnerships

Clubbed Thumb ponders establishing relationships in theatre...

Given some food for thought at a Mellon-organized conversation about theater partnerships, something that, given the nature of our A-ha! grant, is very much on my mind. One thing we all said: it's great to be in a room talking together, because it is hard to find the time for that (although we weren't that great at saying that much that was specific when we were all together--better when we divided up into smaller groups). My current thinking: I wish I had structured the grant so that I could hire someone to do part of my job, so I had more time to cultivate these relationships, instead of, say, write grants. But of course I only want to spend money on production... which is why I applied with a Do It instead of a Think It!

--Maria Striar, Clubbed Thumb

What Are the Benefits to Joining an Asian Pacific American Talent Agency?

East West Players have been receiving differing opinions as they pursue the creation of an Asian Pacific American talent Agency. Here's a recent update...

Our information gathering interviews are continuing. We’ve found a range of reactions to the idea of an APA (Asian Pacific American) talent agency, from excitement to hesitancy to (and this has happened more often than one may expect) initial hesitancy which grows into excitement. Part of this is an initial denial of ‘being held back because of ethnicity’ in their current agency (“No, no. My agency sends me out to all kinds of calls”). But as the interview continues, there is a moment when a realization strikes (“Well, I do get sent out for a lot of Latino roles. I don’t feel I’m right for them because I know I can’t bring that kind of [cultural] flavor, but I’ll go. Maybe an APA agency would be nice because I won’t have to explain…” –A Filipino American Actor).

As we continue compiling our findings, we’d like to toss out a question that was asked to us and has caused us to reflect the range of our exploration process.

Why not a talent management firm as opposed to a talent agency? Given the scope of our mission and the goals we’ve outlined for this agency…we had an A-ha! moment. Why not?

Stay tuned.

--Lisa Tang, East West Players

Planning the Spring High School Residency

It feels like spring. That must mean it's time for Book-It to work out the logistics for the upcoming high school residency.

February we had an energizing meeting with the Seattle Literacy Consortium. The Consortium has nine members, all of whom are non-profit organizations that offer free or low-cost basic-skills programs to adults seeking to learn English or improve their basic literacy skills. They embraced our work and gave great guidance on strategies to support successful partnerships in the world of adult literacy.

Primarily we have been wrapping up a high school residency during which we’ve been assessing student work and evaluating our teaching practice. Right now, we are buried under piles of paper, photographs, video and audio recordings from four classes and a total of 113 students. These piles include student poems, adaptations, literary analysis worksheets, student reflections, performance images, collaborative dialogue, and assessment checklists. We are reviewing all the documents and coding themes that tell the story of the students’ experience. Then we’ll take this information and make adjustments for our spring residency where we work with five more classes at the same school.

-- Gail Sehlhorst, Book-It Repertory Theatre

When Do You Turn to Plan B?

What do you do when things don't go as originally planned? Clubbed Thumb shares their ideas when they encountered that scenario:

We realized that the turnaround from mid-October, when the grant could be made public, to now, when our summer programming decisions had to be finalized, was not enough time to fully execute this program. Over the fall and winter, we had a lot of great conversations, many of which had/have the potential to bear fruit. Ultimately, the one or two projects to which we narrowed down could not be worked out for this summer. While we could put something in place to satisfy the terms of the grant on our original timeline, it would be much more valuable if we could continue to explore the proposed parameters of the grant. We are looking at 2011 for the partnering projects to happen. This situation however introduces an additional burden; we must secure enough of a firm commitment from a partnering institution so that grant funds will be spent by the end of March, even if the productions are a little later. Because that is right up to the margin, we have planned a September 2010 check-in, by which point if we do not have a relationship fairly firmly in place we will move to a Plan B. We have a rough-out of that plan now, and will hone it over the coming months as we re-engage with our initial conversations. Emilya (Emilya Cachapero, TCG)has made a good suggestion: going to our core playwrights to see what they are working on with other institutions, and seeing if we can find a good collaboration that way; we also have projects that were of interest, but could not be fit into the initial timeline. In sum ... we have our work cut out for us, but are excited about the further exploration of our idea.

--Maria Striar, Clubbed Thumb

Lessons from Air and Space

This week in A-ha!, Miriam Weisfeld from Woolly Mammoth (A-ha! Round 1) reflects on her sabbatical at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, and how she ended up there in the first place.

Sabbatical at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum
Miriam Weisfeld
Director of New Play Development, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company

Wilbur Wright (from the NASM collection)

Part 1:
Getting off the Ground

As Woolly Mammoth’s Director of New Play Development, I’ve long suspected parallels between my dramaturgical work and the work of curators and exhibit developers at the many museums that surround our theatre here in Washington. In July 2009, Woolly Mammoth co-hosted the annual Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas conference; we included a session called “Dramaturging the Museum” with representatives from the Newseum, the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum (NASM), and the Folger Shakespeare Library. This fascinating conference session confirmed my instincts, and I called the Director of Exhibits at the Newseum to ask whether I might spend a sabbatical observing her work.

I was intrigued by the Newseum because their journalistic focus seemed particularly interesting from a dramaturgical perspective: journalists make constant choices about the authority, bias, and context of covering a story—surely these questions were central to the Newseum’s choices as well. And the Newseum was on the cutting edge of broadcast technology, with actual TV and radio studios embedded in the museum—an exciting way to see how electronic media can help shape a live narrative experience. I had lunch with the Newseum’s Director of Exhibits and we discovered a common passion to bring together stakeholders from DC’s various cultural institutions and provoke fresh exchanges.

But after a series of phone calls, emails, and meetings, the Director of Exhibits was unable to convince the Newseum’s administration to grant permission for me to observe her work. The administration’s concern was the blog you’re reading now: since I planned to document my observations on the TCG website, I might reveal plans for Newseum exhibits before the museum was prepared to release that information to the public. The Director of Exhibits sheepishly acknowledged the irony of a journalism museum squelching my First Amendment rights. But, she explained, the Newseum is a private corporation which depends on ticket sales to stay in business; therefore, the corporation closely guards their marketing and communications strategy.

Fired up by this challenge, I contacted Barbara Brennan, the Director of Exhibit Design at NASM. Soon I was sitting in her office, telling her about my frustrated attempt to collaborate with her counterpart at the Newseum. Barbara shook her head in surprise. She pointed out that when NASM exhibits are under construction on the museum floor, the safety barriers are deliberately kept low enough for visitors to watch the engineers installing and repairing aircraft or spacecraft. Sometimes, she said, engineers will take breaks to chat with the visitors about the new exhibits they’re assembling. The Smithsonian Museums, Barbara told me, “belong to the public,” and therefore seek to be transparent whenever possible.

Fortunately, Barbara also had a personal interest in trading information with me: she was originally trained as a theatrical set designer. I learned that one of her major accomplishments at NASM was an exhibit on the Wright Brothers that included performance spaces where actors playing Wilbur, Orville, and their sister to perform a miniature play for museum visitors. The exhibit was meant to be temporary, but its popularity won it a place in the museum’s permanent collection-- even after funds ran out to pay for actors and costumes for the play. Since then, Barbara had been itching to revisit performance in the museum space. We agreed I would spend a week exploring NASM, shadowing Barbara’s work, and brainstorming about connections between museums and theatres.

Part 2:
Friendly Skies

My first meeting at NASM felt a whole lot like season planning at Woolly Mammoth: I watched Barbara sit down with a photographer and a designer to discuss the rotation of temporary exhibits in NASM’s art gallery. For each show, they roughed out a budget for paint, lighting, and banners. Each exhibit, I learned, must be approved by the Public Programs Committee; in their pitches, designers must propose a strategy for funding each show. I told Barbara I was surprised by how immediately design planning became a budgeting task. She nodded, explaining that pairing donors with exhibits at a public museum could be a highly sensitive issue. For example, one artist had assembled a collection of NASM-related works and volunteered to pay to install them in NASM’s gallery himself. “Does that mean private artists are buying space here?” she asked.

This led us to a conversation about the weight of the Smithsonian’s perceived fairness and authority. Many exhibit developers, I learned, feel compelled to communicate a straightforward narrative that the museum’s partners—NASA, say, or even Boeing or Lockheed Martin—can approve. The range of stories told at NASM is also dictated in part by the collections the museum already owns. There have been many female aviators more accomplished than Amelia Earhart, Barbara pointed out. But the museum owns far more memorabilia of Earhart than of any other aviatrix—largely because Earhart so successfully cultivated her own celebrity status.

A theatre like Woolly Mammoth, on the other hand, enjoys a relative freedom to tell stories that deviate wildly from the “official” historical record—but is anyone listening? Woolly Mammoth will never have the number of visitors that NASM hosts every year. Is there a way for Woolly to be heard by more people, and for NASM to represent more unconventional voices? Barbara and I decided to talk more about narrative, performance, and audience with exhibit developers from other Smithsonian museums to get their perspectives.

A couple days later, Barbara and I hosted a pan-Smithsonian “brown bag lunch” for exhibit designers. The topic was “theatrical performance in exhibit space,” and we drew quite a crowd—I met representatives from the National Museum of the American Indian, the National Museum of Natural History, the Smithsonian Center for Education and Museum Studies, the Zoo, and two museum authorities from outside the Smithsonian Institute who also heard about the lunch and wanted to join. We traded stories about stage combat performances at an arms museum in Kentucky; a comedy sketch about composting at an antebellum plantation home; a puppet show about frogs at the zoo. Most performances were conceived for children and families, but Vincent Scott, a Program Specialist from the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), described intensive collaborations with sophisticated Native American theatres and performers.

We discovered that NMAI enjoyed an unusual degree of administrative support for performances—and this connected to the question of narrative authority. By devoting museum space to Native performers, NMAI allowed Native Americans to tell their own stories in their own voices rather than via Smithsonian curators. Vincent pointed out that this sometimes caused discomfort for visitors: a performance of the Thanksgiving story from a Native perspective, for example, contradicted the narrative that many visitors accepted as true. I wondered what kind of meta-theatrical framing NMAI had used to bridge this distance between performers and visitors. Vincent said program notes and discussions with the artists sometimes helped.

But even “theatre etiquette” was unfamiliar to many museum visitors; we hard complaints about noise, sightlines, cranky docents, and other barriers to performance in spaces not built for live actors. The duration of performances proved a universal challenge. Visitors often devote only a few minutes to each exhibit—particularly at Smithsonian Museums, which are free (“They get their money’s worth,” Barbara lamented). And then there was the cost of performers. Even when administrators agreed to incorporate live performance into exhibits, Equity rules often constrained live performance, webcasts, and other electronic means to reach a wider audience.

Despite these challenges, the exhibit designers all enthusiastically embraced the idea of theatrical collaborations. I asked how we could work together to overcome some of these challenges: could actors perform five or ten minute teasers of plays during the day that are performed in their entirety at the theatre in the evening? Could we keep in touch as we plan our seasons to coordinate plays and exhibits that commemorate the same historical events and social questions? Could we consciously use the theatre as a platform for the voices of diversity and dissent not always represented at the museums? Theatres could certainly grow by reaching museum visitors, but could performances actually diversify museum visitors? For example, could theatre help lure more women to science and engineering exhibits?

We talked about the International Museum/Theatre Alliance; a study of these collaborations by the University of Manchester; and other potential resources. The Smithsonian Commons, a new pan-Smithsonian website designed to share information across the Institution and among visitors, might help shake up the “burden on authority” and democratize museum narratives. We agreed to keep the conversation going and explore more concrete ways to work together.

Later, Barbara and I put together a mini-survey of follow-up questions to help us imagine next steps. I emailed this to the lunch participants:

Follow-up Survey

1) We discussed several challenges that face performances inside exhibit space: noise, cost, duration of the performance, visitors who lack “theatre etiquette.” Please list the major barriers you experience when trying to bring performance into exhibit space:

2) NASM sometimes presents lectures that aren’t an ideal fit for their IMAX theatre. Are there museum-related events that might fit better in a theatre space than a museum space? Could a downtown theatre like Woolly Mammoth be helpful in these cases?

3) Theatres plan most of their shows 1-2 years in advance; is there a way to coordinate this schedule with exhibit planning? What might be an effective model for sharing information about upcoming anniversaries, national, international, or environmental events that could inspire collaboration?

4) Are there perspectives and narratives that don’t always fit into a conventional exhibit? If you made a wish list of stories related to upcoming exhibits that you’d like to commission a playwright to create, what would be on it? (Dream big… maybe we can make it happen!)

Learn More About the First Sustainable Stage Craft Summit

Welcome to the first Sustainable Stagecraft Summit
On February 26th, Childsplay and members of the ASU Global Institute for Sustainability held the first of three Sustainable Stagecraft Summits. We brought together production staff members from Arizona Theatre Company, Actor’s Theatre of Phoenix, and the theatre department at Scottsdale Community College to discuss the materials we use in scenic construction: what we like about them, what we wish we could change, and how we could find more sustainable sources for our materials and dispose of them in a more responsible manner.

{Participants (below) include representatives from Actor's Theatre of Phoenix, Childsplay, Arizona Theatre Company, Scottsdale Community Council, and Arizona State University.}
{Creating lists (below) of recycling options...note the sample tree branch in the center of the room!}
The first part of the morning focused on the types and sources of materials used in scenic construction. Our conversation quickly narrowed to the amount of lauan consumed by the theatrical industry, a problem that was put into real terms by Childsplay’s technical director, whose stories of travel through the devastated Indonesian rain forests inspired Childsplay’s quest to find more sustainable alternatives to our current practices. Jeff brought samples of eco-friendly plywood alternatives currently being used in the architectural design world made from wheat, bamboo, and sorghum straw. The challenges with applying these materials to theatrical uses included: 1) the materials are manufactured for finished work (e.g. furniture, floor, cabinets, etc.) and cannot be purchased in raw form; 2) the materials are not very flexible or durable and probably could not withstand the rigors of trucking and the wear-and-tear of a performance run; 3) the expense alone is up to 10 times the price of lauan, and 4) wheat board, the most practical of the materials options, is not yet manufactured in a ¼” product.

See the video here: Jeff Lemire of Childsplay shares samples of plywood alternatives with summit attendees.

Childsplay - Sustainable Stagecraft Summit 1 from Anthony Runfola on Vimeo.

{Bill Toby (below) from CMS Morrell explains which portions of a sample flat are recyclable.}
Lacking a readily available alternative for lauan, the summit participants began to create the profile of the ideal material:

• Weight: 25 pounds for 4’X8’X1/4” sheet
• Size: 4’X8’ or bigger
• Moduli of rupture and elasticity equal to or superior than that of lauan
• Able to take adhesives, paint and fasteners
• Able to be worked with existing tools
• Non-toxic
• Sustainable harvested and manufactured

We welcome your feedback about these properties and intend to use this information in future conversations with manufacturers.

The victory of the day was the discovery of a regional commodities recycler who would accept far more of our scenic materials with less preparation at strike than we had ever anticipated. At the close of our next show, we will be coordinating with them to take our scenery to recycling right from the loading dock of the theatre. We will also be working with this company to develop recycling resource information specific to theatrical productions, which we will share with you all in the days to come.

The success of this summit was due in large part to its focus on immediate, practical solutions for making stagecraft more sustainable. Everyone walked away from the meeting with a new piece of information they didn’t have before. All participants expressed a desire to build a model of sustainable material and to form partnerships that enable this model’s success. The group also agreed that they wanted to keep communicating with each other in person – we were all thinking the same things individually and just not talking about it with our colleagues. Thanks to TCG for bringing us together!

To learn more about this summit and our next steps, please visit the Childsplay website at www.childsplayaz.org and look for the Sustainable Stagecraft link.

--Jenny Millinger & Anthony Runfola, Childsplay